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Law school graduates face tough job market, high student loan debt

Cooley student

Students at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, like first-year student Latoya Wilson of Ann Arbor, face a tough job market where the unemployment rate for the class of 2012 was 24 percent, or more than twice the national average.
(Fritz Klug | MLive.com)

LANSING -- The caps and gowns have been folded and put away and the celebratory balloons have shriveled. But for law school graduates busy studying for the upcoming bar exam, the balloons aren't the only thing that's deflated: so are their chances of finding a job and paying down six-figure student loan debts, particularly for graduates of the state's two private law schools.

Overall, 17.74 percent of 2012 graduates from Michigan's law schools were unemployed as of Feb. 15, nine months after graduation, more than seven percent above the national average.

That number, however, includes both Thomas M. Cooley Law School and University of Detroit Mercy Law School, where the employment picture is far worse than for the state's public law schools, based on American Bar Association statistics.

Cooley, which has its primary campus in Lansing and satellite campuses in Ann Arbor, Auburn Hills, Grand Rapids and Tampa Bay, Fla., produced 1,079 graduates in the class of 2012, or more than the other four Michigan schools combined. Of those, 264 have failed to find work for an unemployment rate of 24.46 percent. The school also lacks employment information on an additional 9.5 percent of the class.

At Detroit Mercy, where 212 students received J.D. degrees in 2012, 45 are still unemployed, a 21.22 percent rate.

Unemployment rates for the state's two public law schools and one semi-public law school, at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University, were more positive. The lowest rate was for U-M's class, where 23 of 388 graduates, or 6.4 percent, had failed to find work. Michigan State, where the school receives no state funding but is a constituent college of the university, had a graduating class of 291 and 29 students still seeking work, or 9.96 percent. At Wayne State, 18 of the school's 168 graduates, or 10.71 percent, were still unemployed.

Nationwide, the total unemployment rate for 2012 graduates is at 12.8 percent, according to statistics from the National Association for Law Placement, a trade association of legal career advisers.

The majority of graduates at all schools were working in jobs where bar passage is required, with most of those graduates working in firms with fewer than 10 attorneys. UM was the exception, with most of its graduates working in firms with at least 100 attorneys. UM also had the highest percentage of graduates in bar passage jobs, at 86 percent.

Markeisha Minor, assistant dean of career services for Detroit Mercy, said small firm hiring was a reason that Detroit Mercy's unemployment rate was so high.

"Firms with fewer than 25 attorneys tend to hire after bar results come out, so those students haven't started looking for positions in earnest (when statistics are reported)," Minor said.

Cooley had the lowest percentage, with only 32 percent of graduates working in bar passage jobs. Of the remaining employed students, most were working in "J.D. advantage" positions, defined by the ABA as jobs where having a law degree is not required but is beneficial. Cooley reported that 160 students, or 14.83 percent of graduates, were in such positions.

Charles Toy, dean of career services at Cooley, said many of the school's students are moving in that direction because of the value of a legal education.

"There are a lot of things in a legal education that prepare you for all kinds of jobs," Toy said.

Elliot Spoon, assistant dean for career development at Michigan State, said graduates at his school were experiencing the same shift. "We have a number of people going into compliance even though you don't have to have an admission to the bar," Spoon said. "I do think that this challenging time in legal education has made the stakeholders look at things differently."

Compounding the difficulties graduates face after school is the cost of getting a law degree. According to the ABA, the average student loan debt in 2011 for a graduate of a public law school was $75,728, while private law school graduates had an average debt of $124,950.

For the students who do find full-time jobs lasting more than a year, paying back that loan debt is still a challenge. A NALP survey of starting salaries in the class of 2012 found that while the median salary for a new attorney was about $61,000, but that figure is based on data from only approximately 65 percent of jobs. According to NALP, almost 30 percent of reported salaries came from large law firms where starting salaries exceeded $160,000 and therefore the average may overstate potential earnings.